Her drawings reject nostalgia. They function as records — of exile, ecology, memory, and what remains after the flood. - Antonino La Vela.

In this essay, I have tackled understanding something about what Japan might teach the USA now about survival…

In retaliation for global warming, the sea seems to be coming for coastal humanity. This is not because the sea is vindictive and malevolent. It is because the sea has always been in conversation with continental coastlines, giving and taking sediment to keep estuaries alive.

The image preceding this short essay is of a man floating free in air, his body's vulnerability completely exposed. When I painted it, I thought, "this is what social change will require. Tolerating that scale of vulnerability from men."

Five years ago, David Orr wrote, "If today is a typical day in capitols around the world, the dismantling of even the flimsiest laws protecting air, water, lands, biota, climate, and health will proceed apace, but mostly out of sight.

“Connecting Dots,” fresh water met salt water for the first time in 100 years at the Ghost Nets Site 1997. Photograph by Aviva Rahmani

Tomorrow, I will join island colleagues heading for the mainland for another protest against this administration.

In the development of my trigger point theory about systemic collapse, I began with two simple biogeographic ideas and extrapolated first to the restoration of natural habitat in Ghost Nets, and then to law and policy guidelines in Blued Trees. The first idea was articulated by E.O. Wilson and Robert MacArthur.

This is a seminal time for me at a seminal time in the world. My work is getting attention. The world is hurtling over a cliff at warp speed.

In any artwork, there is a focal point. In a flat image, it could be a dash of cadmium red paint. In a sculpture, it may be the torque that guides the eye through space. In a work of conceptual art, the focal point might be what is implied: that an idea has a visual presence in our brain. Activist and social practice art is easy: what is the functional change? As an ecoartivist, my focal point is just beyond my reach right now. It is in what I can't know, predict or anticipate.

Tonight will be the second session of the reading group I moderate for ecoartspace, “Fiction as Resistance,” I have requested of the group, that they find passages they care to share from Octavia Butler’s, “The Parable of the Sower.” The book has gotten a lot of recent attention for its prescience.

Our times have inspired me to create a new drawing series, "Tolstoy and I," represented by the Anita Rogers Gallery. I have initiated this series of conte pencil self-portraits on the torn pages of my late mother’s 1937 edition of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace," in the original Cyrillac and French. Tolstoy began writing this epic novel 165 years ago.

Every culture has a notion of justice. The coincidence of Donald Trump's inauguration and Martin Luther King's Day, days after devastating fires in LA might be a good time to consider juatice in what it means to choose to listen to inconvenient truths or enforce silence on witnesses in the name of the status quo. Justice is an evolutionary process that requires both witnessing and listening. Fires and floods are bearing witness to us all.

When I was a small child, I was plagued by nightmares of enormous monsters pursuing me. I had no means at the time to understand the possible source of those dreams. We now know that epigenetic memories are real. I think the dream monsters that pursued me were the avatars of the real monsters that had pursued my parents as war refugees before my birth. I had intuitively internalized their nightmarish histories in Eastern Europe and Palestine. Arguably, that was my first experience of 4 dimensional space-time.